AURORA, N.Y. - On the eastern shores of Cayuga Lake lies a tiny village of enchanting beauty and charm. Early settlers called it the village of constant dawn and it evokes that feeling today - historic, lakeside mansions dusted in a kind of timeless glow, a red-brick inn with gleaming white porches, ivy-clad buildings rising from the stately lawns of Wells College.
Even the village market, where exquisitely perched baskets overflow with ripe tomatoes and eggplants, seems almost too good to be true.
For some who live here, it is.
"How polished we are now, how shiny," says village historian Sheila Edmunds. "But at what cost?"
The village of 700, listed on the National Registrar of Historic Places, was anything but shiny six years ago. Paint peeled off old mansions, the inn struggled to stay open and the college struggled with enrollments.
And then a wealthy benefactress swept in, bringing money and promises and a stirring vision of the future. She bought some buildings and tore others down. She moved houses and businesses and trees. She buried power lines. She spent $2 million on a lavish refurbishing of college interiors.
She rattled the village to its core.
"It wasn't restoration," says music teacher Karen Hindenlang of the changes, which tore apart old friendships and rankled neighborly goodwill. "It was a descent to madness."
Randi Zabriskie, owner of Jane Morgan's Little House clothing store, says it unleashed nothing short of a war.
"It was like this great white Arabian horse came walking through our village and little houseflies jumped on it - sad, diminished people who didn't understand that this place was going to dust and she saved it."
The savior was Pleasant Rowland of Madison, Wis., who made her fortune creating The American Girl doll - pricey toys with homespun historical biographies (Kirsten, a pioneer girl of strength and spirit; Addy, a courageous girl during the Civil War; and others.)
Today, debate still simmers. Did the doll tycoon save Aurora?
Or in attempting to restore and recreate it, did she transform the village into a glossy historical caricature that somehow lost its soul?
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On a sweltering August night at the start of the college year, gowned Wells seniors process beneath the pillars of MacMillan Hall for a candlelit opening convocation. The 140-year-old tradition has changed little since the white-gloved era of the 1960s, when Pleasant Thiele was student at this small liberal arts college for women. (Men were admitted in 2005).
Her love affair with Aurora began her first day.
"For me it had to do with the tall, ancient trees, the ravines, and sparkling lake and the lovely historic homes and campus buildings," she has said. "It was beautiful, it was timeless and it became a part of me like no place in the world ever has."
Years later, after selling her company to Mattel Inc. for $700 million, Pleasant Thiele Rowland would return to Aurora, bringing those memories - and a dream.
On May 17, 2001, she stood before villagers crammed into the 109-year old Morgan Opera House on Main Street and shared that dream.
She would restore the inn to its 19th-century glory, recapturing the era when the Morgan and Wells families dominated village life. She would replace the village market and the old ice cream parlor with more upscale versions. She would open a new pizza place. She would build a dock. She would restore the Queen Anne-style Abbott House and the Federal-style Leffingwell house.
In a final gesture, Rowland would take over the town's biggest business, MacKenzie-Childs Ltd., a sprawling pottery and home furnishings center on the outskirts of the village, buying it out of bankruptcy to save 240 jobs.
All this would be done through a new company, The Aurora Foundation, in partnership with the college, which owned many of the historic properties.
Villagers listened, mesmerized.
The 60-year-old businesswoman cut a striking figure, with her cropped white hair, steely blue eyes and commanding voice. She was so certain. So passionate. So wealthy.
Everyone knew how Rowland and her husband, Jerome Frautschi, had supported artistic and cultural endeavors in Madison, including donating $200 million for the Overture Center for the Arts.
But even as Rowland declared "a new day for Aurora, a second sunrise for this dear place," there were ripples of unease.
Rowland promised not to seek - or take - any return on her investment. But she took no questions either, so as villagers wandered home that evening, they were left to ponder.
Was this woman's vision the right one for them?
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Wells College was established in 1868 by Henry Wells, founder of the Wells Fargo and American Express companies. Along with MacKenzie-Childs, the college is the main employer in the area and dominates village life.
It was college president Lisa Marsh Ryerson, a Wells graduate herself, who first reached out to Rowland in the mid-1990s.
"The college needed help," Ryerson said, sitting in her newly refurbished, wood-paneled office. "By restoring the public spaces, Pleasant gave the college the gift of life."
The gift certainly spruced up things, though not everyone agreed with Rowland's taste - deep red and green carpets, puffy floral sofas, restoration furniture and heavy drapes. And there was grumbling among some faculty about such large sums of money going into appearances, rather than educational programs.
But it wasn't until Rowland turned her attention to the village itself that things turned ugly.
People could accept the passing of Mack's, the dusty old candy store where generations of kids had traipsed in for ice cream sodas, proudly paying their own small tabs. Folks understood that Doris "Ma" Reynolds sold out because she was sick and needed money for health costs. They could even accept losing the old market.
The Aurora Inn, owned by the college, was an entirely different matter.
Built in 1833 by E.B. Morgan, co-founder of The New York Times, the lakeside inn had become a shabby reflection of its former self. But original sections remained intact, including the distinctive central stairwell and the Federal-style front-to-back hallway.
So when Rowland's foundation revealed plans to gut the interior, a small group of citizens took action.
They petitioned the Board of Trustees, and the Community Preservation Panel and the Planning Board. They wrote letters to the editor. They won the support of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Preservation League of New York state. Finally, as The Aurora Coalition Inc., they sued to stop the project.
"There was a feeling that she was trying to remake us into the perfect community," says coalition spokeswoman Hindenlang. "Everyone wanted to see the inn reopen, but her plans were no more historically authentic than her dolls."
But the suit infuriated others who viewed a new inn - as well as Rowland's money and goodwill - as vital to the local economy. Signs sprouted on lawns - circles with a line slashed through the words "No Coalition." Counter signs and bumper stickers appeared with slogans like "Aurora was Pleasant before."
Certain villagers started eyeing others warily at the post office and the dump. Others took to calling Aurora "Pleasantville." People crossed the street to avoid each other.
The incestuous nature of college and village relationships only fueled the distrust. Ryerson is married to a village trustee. Mayor Tom Gunderson is Wells' superintendent of facilities. Deputy Mayor Jim Chase is the college's director of custodial services. Even Hindenlang is married to a Wells professor of music.
"There was a sense that you couldn't be too outspoken, that people's jobs and livelihoods were at stake," says Linda Schwab, a recently retired Wells professor of chemistry. "It was all very hurtful."
In January 2001 the wrecking ball swung through the inn. Soon other buildings followed. The lawsuit was dismissed.
Overnight, it seemed, Aurora was taken over by bulldozers and builders. Overnight, it seemed, the village of constant dawn had changed forever.
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In July 2005 a giant octopus, mounted on a pickup truck, floated down Main Street during the annual Aurorafest parade, each tentacle stamped with the name of a building that Rowland's foundation had acquired.
The octopus' creator, Tudy Kenyon, revels in her role as good-natured village eccentric, bouncing around in her bright blue Jeep with a ram's skull on front and anti-Rowland stickers on the back. Small and wiry with bobbed white hair and a husky voice, the 77-year-old came to Aurora from Pittsburgh in 1950s to go to Wells. She loved the place so much she never left.
At 6 p.m., Kenyon heads, barefoot, into the Fargo bar. She spends the next hour and a half sipping ginger ale, hailing the regulars, lamenting the tavern of the past.
The place crackles with conviviality but regulars say its heart has been lost. The old beer signs are gone along with the old bartenders, the deer's head has been moved to the back room, and the beloved smoky dinginess is a thing of the past. There's a pretty new porch outside and a spiffed up menu inside, and children now eat with their parents in the corner booth.
"The Fargo was the one place that was ours and she had to take that too," says Stanley Zabriskie, 56, another barefoot regular and descendant of one of the oldest families in town. (His brother is a village trustee and his sister-in-law, the clothing store owner, is one of Rowland's biggest cheerleaders).
Zabriskie and others recall golf tournaments that were planned here, and fish fried up in the little back kitchen, and the professor whose heart was so broken when the old Fargo went that he moved to another town.
For many it was not just the changes to the bar, but change in ownership that stung. Many felt that Jim Orman, who had run the place for years, was treated unfairly when his lease was not renewed.
Feelings ran so high that the village trustees, in an extraordinary letter to the college, asked that the Fargo, "the very last bastion of a local hangout," be spared.
The only member not to sign was the one married to the college president.
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Across the street from the Fargo, the inn glows invitingly as an elegant party - Wells faculty and their guests - spills onto the back porch overlooking the lake. There will be dancing and music into the night, and over the weekend the inn will host two weddings.
The new inn is steeped in four-star luxury with designer fabrics and marble bathrooms and historic portraits decorating the walls. At peak season rates of up to $350 a night, it is fully booked - as is the magnificent 19th-century gray stone mansion next to it, which Rowland restored as the E.B. Morgan guest house.
It is a scene that locals say would have been unimaginable several years ago.
"It would have taken most people decades to achieve this," says photographer Jacci Farlow as she sips homemade lemonade on her deck just outside the village. "Why can't people appreciate that?"
She opens her latest book - "Aurora in Just Five Years" - page after page of beautifully rendered images of Aurora, before and after Rowland.
Farlow readily acknowledges what the book doesn't depict.
It doesn't show Jay O'Hearn's gray Mercury Marquis permanently parked outside the inn, plastered with anti-Rowland slogans.
Or Debbie Brooks' wistfulness as she talks about losing her gift shop, after the foundation forced her and other small merchants to move out of the old school building.
Or Jim Orman's sadness as he sits on his deck a block from the bar he took such pride in running and talks about feeling betrayed when his lease was not renewed.
Farlow sighs. She knows the speed of change unnerved as many people as it impressed. She knows that for some, there is a lingering sense that if only things had been handled differently, perhaps Rowland's legacy would different too.
Rowland is famously reclusive. Even at the height of her American Girl doll fame, she granted few interviews. She did not speak to the local media during her time in Aurora, and still refers all inquiries to her spokeswoman, Katie Waller, who also headed her foundation. She has not revealed how much money was poured into her project, though clearly it is tens of millions of dollars.
Farlow was one of a handful of locals who worked closely with Rowland, and got to know her. She, like Ryerson and Zabriskie and others, describes a woman of uncommon brilliance, determination and charm.
They point to Rowland's many small acts of generosity - helping the fire department raise money for an ambulance, contributing to Aurorafest, fixing the broken finials on the historic Masonic lodge. They talk about her friendly, smiling manner.
But they also describe her intense attention to detail, and her drive.
"She knows exactly what she wants," Farlow said. "And she pushes herself harder than anyone to achieve it."
In a Fortune magazine piece about her doll company in 2002, Rowland said, "If you have a strong vision, you can't let any piece of its execution go. Everything has to be a `10.'"
But even for Rowland perfection can be elusive.
Susan "Cookie" Wheeler, former chef at Mackenzie-Childs spent months trying to recreate a morning bun, a cinnamon delicacy that Rowland remembered from childhood. Over and over Wheeler made batches of dough. But it was never quite chewy enough, or sweet enough, or the look was wrong.
In the end Wheeler concluded, "There is only so far you can go to recreate something that is in someone's mind."
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In June 2006 Rowland announced that the work of her foundation was complete, and that she was turning over control of her buildings and businesses to the college.
But it was clear to everyone that her mission hadn't ended the way she intended.
Her plan to raze the post office, a small cinderblock building near the inn, was foiled when reviews by the regional postal service dragged on and eventually Rowland pulled out. The proposal had included donating lakeside property for a village park, which also fell through. There had even been talk of expanding the college golf course from nine holes to 18.
There are other lingering disputes that cast a pall over Rowland's legacy. Victoria and Richard Mackenzie-Childs, original owners of the pottery center, have sued for rights to use their name in their new craft company. Another resident is fighting Rowland over the terms of the sale of her house.
Rowland recently put Mackenzie-Childs up for sale. Though her spokeswoman denies it, there are many who believe the doll tycoon has left Aurora for good.
The Abbott House, which Rowland had originally hoped to open as a guest house, and the Leffingwell house, her personal residence, have been beautifully restored. But they sit empty most of the time.
And though Rowland was spotted briefly this summer, her friend Randi Zabriskie says she cannot comfortably walk down Main Street again "and risk one of those idiots spitting at her."
Zabriskie hosted a thank you party for Rowland last January. Before 150 people, her husband Steve Zabriskie, read a poem thanking Rowland for shining her light on Aurora.
As Zabriskie tells it, Rowland grew misty-eyed.
"In my heart I knew you were all there," she said. "I just didn't know you were so many."
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There are pockets of the village that haven't been touched by Rowland, places like Shakelton's Hardware store on Main Street, where wooden floorboards creak with 100 years of history and paint peels off the front porch. Old farm tools hang on the walls and there's a vintage Singer sewing machine in the back where owner Joe DeForest quilts when things are slow, which is often.
DeForest said he would have sold in a heartbeat, if Rowland had been interested, but "hardware didn't appeal to her." So DeForest runs his business the old-fashioned way, even as he ponders the transformation of his town.
"Anytime you have this much change, you lose something too," he says.
In DeForest's view, the village has lost the special egalitarian quality it so prided itself on, where professors mingled with farmers and merchants - at the inn and the market and the Fargo - and good conversation mattered more than class.
Money, and the control of one entity, has changed that, he says. He wonders if it will ever return.
He remembers when it changed, that spring night six years ago when it seemed like half the village packed into the Morgan opera house. He remembers how everyone listened, spellbound, to a white-haired stranger who spoke with such passion and such promise - of a new beginning for Aurora.
Much of what she promised happened. But everything looks so different in the harsh light of a new day.
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